Naheed touches the rim of the plate with a fingertip and slowly begins to slide it away from her. It goes over the edge of the table and shatters on the floor.
Tara brings another.
‘In your condition a woman must eat to maintain her strength.’
There is no response from Naheed.
‘I didn’t put anything in it,’ she encourages. ‘Surely you know you’ll damage the child’s development if you don’t eat.’
Naheed breaks off a piece of chapatti and scoops an amount of spinach from the new plate and raises it to her mouth but then drops it.
‘I didn’t invent this world, Naheed. Your life will be ruined.’
‘This is Jeo’s last reminder in the world.’
‘He didn’t think of you when he went to Afghanistan, why are you thinking of him?’
‘This is my child. I’ll bring him up myself.’
‘How exactly will that happen?’
‘I’ll get a diploma and become a teacher and when he grows up he’ll look after me.’
‘He? What if it’s a girl? Where will we get the money to marry her off in twenty years? Or will she too get a diploma and prepare her own dowry?’
‘I am not listening to any of this.’
‘And are you sure you are intelligent enough to get a diploma? You didn’t even pass high school.’
Naheed looks fiercely at her, stung. ‘I failed my classes because of you. Your imprudence, that landed you in prison for two years. And you were mad even before that.’
Tara takes a step closer. ‘Why are you speaking to me in this manner?’
‘When you came back from prison, I had to contend with the months of madness yet again. You and your djinns.’
‘What do you mean by these remarks?’ Tara says.
‘Nothing. Forget it.’
‘I was ill a few times, that’s all. I did my best to bring you up.’
‘As will I.’
She is silent but then she speaks. ‘What do you mean by those remarks?’
Naheed looks at her. In her childhood she was afraid of Tara. Terrified of the djinns that visited her. Tara would not speak for days and just lay in bed facing the wall. Naheed learned to cook and care for her from very early on. One day a child even threw a stone at Tara as children do at lunatics. Naheed has always wondered how much of those weeks and months her mother recalls. They have never been mentioned by either of them with any directness. When she became a teenager, Naheed acquired the idea of becoming a teacher, of one day carrying a purse and walking confidently, clipping the front strands of her hair to rest on her cheeks. But her schoolwork was suffering. She remembers the humiliation of having to repeat her classes, and then Tara was arrested.
‘Father will help in bringing up the child.’
‘He hasn’t much of anything,’ Tara says from the armchair. ‘I thought he was wealthy but I was mistaken. Even the house belongs to the people who own the school, and they might want it back one day. Jeo becoming a doctor was the only secure future he, and you, had.’
Naheed looks at the plate and then pushes it away.
‘Your Jeo’s last gift to you will be you becoming the plaything of that man downstairs, or of someone else like him, for the next decade and a half. And then you will be cast aside. Do you wish to make a life around that? Once a month, in the dead of night, you and your child can walk through the dark streets to pay a visit to Jeo’s grave.’
Naheed carries the tray back into the kitchen and returns with a rag and begins to clean the mess of the first plate from the floor.
‘I will wait for a few days, until I am absolutely sure, and then I will tell Father and Yasmin. I’ll find someone to marry me,
with
my child. You can win great merit from Allah for marrying a martyr’s widow. Everyone says that.’
‘It’s all talk.’
Naheed rises to her feet and looks at her. ‘Then I’ll live on my own.’
*
As Tara stands on the prayer mat and bows down towards Mecca, she has a sense that the girl is standing behind her. From the small metallic sound she knows that she is holding the pair of scissors. After twenty years of handling them Tara knows every possible sound they make. When she finishes her prayers, however, and turns around the girl is still on the bed. The scissors have moved from the shelf to the windowsill. Or perhaps they were there to begin with.
*
Sometimes Tara thinks she has asked too little from life. Sometimes she thinks she has asked too much.
When Naheed was fourteen years old, Tara had been assaulted by a man she had recently met. She went to the police and they demanded – in accordance with Sharia law – proof from four male witnesses that it was indeed an assault and not consensual intercourse. There were no such witnesses, of course, and Tara was jailed for adultery. Naheed went to live with her village grandmother while Rohan tried to have Tara released.
It was while she was incarcerated, terrified of the future, that Rohan had reassured her by promising to make Naheed his daughter-in-law.
And that madness of hers that Naheed mentioned, her djinns – her mind would feel broken into during those hours and days. A young widow, her youth slipping away, she had wanted her husband to be alive again. She cannot believe she is thinking this while sitting on a prayer mat – recalling the days of combatting desire, the feeling of guilt in her whenever she thought of a man, feeling like a criminal for wanting something as basic as love and an end to loneliness, feeling maimed in her very soul. What will Naheed do about these things? Sharif Sharif used Tara for a few years after she was widowed and then threw her aside. He already had two wives and her hope of becoming the third came to nothing. She wants to stand up but her knees won’t let her so she raises herself a little on her haunches and pulls the velvet prayer mat from under her and folds it with a kiss and puts it on her lap. Sitting on the cold floor, she knows she mustn’t allow the girl to repeat her own mistake. The matchmakers said again and again that the presence of the daughter reduced her chances of remarrying, and they advised her to have Naheed adopted. ‘They change their mind when they hear you’ll be bringing another mouth to feed. A girl whose upbringing will have to be provided for, whose honour and virginity protected, for whom a dowry will have to be given one day.’
She sent the child away to live in the village, but even then the marriage talks failed to progress beyond a certain point. People were invariably delighted to learn that she was descended from the Prophet, the idea that through her they could connect with Muhammad’s bloodline, but she would invite the prospective in-laws to this roof and of course it would be a mistake to let them see the poverty. One room with a small balcony at the front, the steep stairs, and a cubby she called kitchen. The last man who came here ended up marrying someone whose family owned a business in Riyadh, the bride no doubt bringing a car and a washing machine in the dowry, a colour television and a VCR. ‘So much for Muhammad’s blood unaided by Saudi gold,’ said the matchmaker.
She brought Naheed back and the years kept passing. She began to fantasise about a man she saw walk by in the street regularly, and one day she talked to him briefly at someone’s house, convincing herself that he loved her too. She wrote a long letter to him and he came up here and according to him it was not an assault, her letter being the proof of his innocence.
*
The lock on the stairs remains in place, its key in Tara’s pocket, and for two days and two nights Naheed does not eat anything Tara brings.
*
‘One reason I can’t do what you want me to do,’ Naheed says, her face turned away, ‘is that I know he is alive.’
‘A woman can’t feel the child inside her at such an early stage.’
‘I am talking about Mikal.’
‘Mikal?’ Tara looks at her. ‘Have you heard something? Has he been in touch?’ Then she stiffens. ‘Why are you waiting for him anyway?’
‘I know he is alive and that he will come back to me. We loved each other.’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘Yes you did. He didn’t say anything but I think he came here to ask for my hand. You must have made him feel like a worthless beggar. I know. We planned to disappear from here before the wedding, we agreed on a time, but he didn’t come. I waited, and I never really stopped.’ She pauses and takes a deep breath. ‘Maybe this new waiting is just part of the old one.’
‘Did you two plan all this?’ Tara says quietly. ‘He took Jeo away to have him killed and now you’ll wait for his return? Is this Mikal’s child?’
‘It’s nothing like that, Mother. I just know he’s alive, I feel him.’
‘You can’t build a life on a feeling, Naheed. I may be mad but I know that much.’
‘There is no body, there is no grave.’
‘That doesn’t mean he is not dead. Some boys who went to Kashmir or Bosnia or Tajikistan didn’t come back, just the news of their death.’
Naheed breaks into tears. ‘Oh Mother, I don’t know what to think. But please understand I can’t do what you are telling me. And I did not say you were mad.’
Tara gets up. She stops at the door. ‘He did come here and I sent him away. You’ve known all along?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you were going to run away?’ She looks devastated as she asks this. ‘Leaving me behind, with those wedding preparations I’d made, having to explain to Jeo’s family and the entire neighbourhood what happened? Everyone would have said that I, being a wanton woman, had raised a brazen disgraceful daughter.’
There is a pained silence from both and then Tara comes back and takes the key from her pocket and places it next to Naheed on the bed.
She brings in a tray of food, telling her it is unadulterated, but Naheed still cannot bring herself to trust her.
‘You’ll fall ill with weakness. Believe me and eat something,’ Tara says, pointing to the tray and then to the fridge in the corner – the kitchen is too small to accommodate it so it stands here in the bedroom, their only room, filling the air faintly with the odour of chemicals that have been leaking from its mechanisms ever since it was bought second- or third-hand a decade ago.
Finally Tara unlocks the door to the stairs herself.
‘Then go to Rohan’s house and eat something from there.’
It’s almost midnight.
‘I’ll go in the morning,’ the girl tells her.
*
Hunger awakens her a few hours later, deep in the night, and she comes out of the room and stands under the star-coated sky. There is a pomegranate in the kitchen, from the trees in Rohan’s garden, that she had brought for Tara some days ago. It has been skinned and the seeds lie glitteringly in a steel bowl, surrounded by their own reflections, the red making her think of the ruby. She lifts a seed and places it on her tongue, then expels it. Tara could have sprinkled something on them.
She looks down from the roof into Sharif Sharif’s courtyard. Towards his family’s kitchen, almost dizzy with hunger. She walks down the stairs and the screen door squeaks as she enters the kitchen, a small bird noise, a cicada. She stops and looks around more or less frantic with the thought that she must nourish the life inside her. Her fingers reach out and blindly lift the lid of a jar and she can tell from the syrupy smell that it is sugar. She places a large pinch onto her tongue, feeling the crystals melt in the saliva. She hears a sound, a breath suddenly drawn in. Or is it the rasp of a matchstick being struck? Will a small yellow flame soon illuminate Sharif Sharif’s face somewhere in the blackness? She drops the jar and hears it break with a sound louder than she would have expected, hears the smaller sound of sugar scattering within the breaking of the glass, a muted hiss. There is graininess under her feet as she rushes out.
Upstairs she eats the pomegranate, lifting the seeds to her mouth with both hands.
When Tara gets up an hour later for her predawn prayers, she is still awake. She asks Tara for breakfast and ten minutes later Tara brings her a paratha and an omelette with coriander, onions and green chillies. When the sun comes up she walks out towards Rohan’s house.
*
She takes a sip of water and a crimson thread swirls into the glass.
She puts it back on the table and lies down on the bed again, shaking with fever. Her skin burns and she feels as though she is looking out through fire.
‘What time is it?’
‘Night,’ Tara says.
‘What day?’
‘Thursday.’
Tara places her hand on her forehead – the hands of kindness and a weak human mercy. Naheed looks into her eyes, the eyes through which she had seen tears enter the world for the first time. She hears Tara say, ‘This isn’t anything to do with me. I didn’t put anything in your food.’
On Friday morning the amber eyes open and she sits up in bed and asks if she can help with the housework. Tara gives her a basket of peas to shell. Ten minutes later when Tara comes into the room she finds her asleep in the chair, with the basket fallen on the floor, the peas scattered.
On Saturday she works on the hem of a tunic that Tara has sewn. Afterwards she goes to the bathroom – Tara reminding her yet again not to lock the door – and spends a long time in there, Tara standing anxiously outside, sounding a knock on the door now and then, gently like a heartbeat, but there is no response.
When at last she emerges Tara asks, ‘Did something happen?’
She gives a nod. ‘It’s over.’
*
She sleeps for a long time but the body temperature remains high, Tara sitting beside the bed with her Koran or her seamstress work.
‘I heard someone say that you sew things, good aunt,’ the young man had said, appearing on the stairs the week before.
Tara makes women’s clothes, but sometimes boys come to her to have their trousers and shirts altered – usually tightened, which their own mothers refuse to do for them.
‘Would you stitch an American flag for me?’
‘An American flag?’
‘Yes, we have to burn it at a protest rally in the bazaar.’
Tara was reluctant. ‘I don’t make such things,’ she told him as she said no. ‘And I would rather not get involved.’ She had imagined herself being arrested for a crime involved with public disorder.